Floor Cleaner Concentrate

Details

A concentrate for the daily pocha, and the number that decides whether it works is the dilution, so it goes first. The dose is one 20 ml cap in a 5 litre bucket, which is 1 part in 250. The cap is moulded with a line at 20 ml. That precision matters because the commonest failure in this category is not the product, it is the pour: a splash straight from the bottle is typically 50 to 60 ml, which is three times the dose, and three times the dose is exactly what leaves the sticky film people then complain about and blame on the cleaner. The opposite error is as common in a big house, where half a cap goes into a 15 litre bucket and cleans nothing. So the arithmetic in full. At 14 percent actives in the bottle diluted 1 in 250, the bucket is working at 0.056 percent surfactant, and a litre gives 50 buckets. That is Rs 7.56 a bucket from the 500 ml, Rs 6.58 from the litre and Rs 5.79 from the 2 litre refill. And on germs, plainly: this is a cleaner and it makes no kill claim. The phenyl in most Indian homes is a phenolic disinfectant fluid to IS 1061, which BIS classifies into six grades by germicidal strength. That is a real disinfectant with a real number behind it. This is not one, it holds no such registration, and it does not pretend to. If somebody in the house has had a stomach infection, buy something registered as a disinfectant and use it at the strength on its own label.

• Actives 14 percent in the concentrate, all three named: sodium C12-14 alkyl polyglucoside 8 percent, C12-15 alcohol ethoxylate 7 EO at 4 percent, sodium cocoyl glutamate 2 percent, which is 0.056 percent in the bucket
• Measured pH 8.2 in the bottle and 7.6 in the bucket at dose, at 27 C. Near neutral is what makes it safe on marble, kota and mosaic, because those are calcium carbonate and an acidic cleaner etches them permanently
• No phenyl and no pine oil. That smell is what a great many Indian homes have learnt to read as clean, and it lingers in a closed room, it irritates airways, and it is genuinely dangerous to cats, which lack the liver enzyme to clear phenolics
• No chlorine bleach, no phosphate, no synthetic dye, no quaternary ammonium compounds, no MIT or CMIT
• Preserved with phenoxyethanol at 0.8 percent in the concentrate. Benzoate would sound friendlier and would not work, because benzoate needs pH below about 5 and this sits at 8.2
• Fragrance is lemongrass oil 0.25 percent and vetiver oil 0.10 percent in the concentrate, and the declarable allergens are quantified: citral 0.19 percent, geraniol under 0.01 percent, limonene under 0.01 percent. In the bucket that is roughly 0.0008 percent citral
• Readily biodegradable to IS 13933, the modified Sturm test, which matters more here than anywhere else in the range because a bucket goes down the drain twice a day
• The trade-off is the smell, or the lack of it. The floor smells of lemongrass for about ten minutes and of nothing after that, and a good number of people read that as the floor not having been cleaned